Museum of Contemporary Art Helga de Alvear

The Museum of Contemporary Art Helga de Alvear celebrates the close relationship between cinema and contemporary art through a temporary exhibition and a film series. In the programme, curated by José María González, both the exhibition model and the film series model converge, or, in other words, both the museum and the film library.

“This is not a movie. Contemporary art and cinema in the Helga de Alvear Collection” is the title of the exhibition made up of photographs, paintings, engravings and sculptures around the cinema, but which does not include audiovisual artworks. The exhibition does not seek to show the cinema made by artists, well represented in the Helga de Alvear Collection, but rather the effect, symptoms and influences of cinema on the work of visual artists.

With the presence of twenty international artists of recognized prestige, the exhibition offers a journey through different thematic perspectives on cinema: Possible but non-existent films (Ignasi Aballí), the script as drawing (Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman, William Kentridge), the origins of cinema as an experience linked to magic and the occult (Tracy Moffatt or Sonia Delaunay), the ability of cinema to precede history (Fernando Bryce), the actor as matter (Andy Warhol or Luis Gordillo), the “anti-actor” (Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman) and Jane & Louis Wilson’s research project on the film not made by Stanley Kubrick on the Jewish Holocaust are the thematic axes that the exhibition proposes.

The program is completed with a film series titled “Movies despite everything. Film and video in the Helga de Alvear Collection” and includes screenings at the Museum and at the local film library, Filmoteca de Extremadura, during the course of the exhibition. The Museum’s auditorium will screenings of video art pieces by artists from the Helga de Alvear Collection, while the Filmoteca de Extremadura will have a special program of historical films in close dialogue with those projected from the museum.

In the words of the curator, the exhibition “proposes an essay through ideas to understand the ubiquitous and inevitable presence of cinema -its thought, its visuality, its time, its characters, its films, its institutions- in contemporary art”, while that the cycle, “as a counterpoint, or countershot, proposes a space for films, a place for cinema and the image projected inside the Helga de Alvear Museum in dialogue with the city’s Film Library”.

With this program, the Helga de Alvear Museum joins the 30th anniversary celebrations of the Cáceres Spanish Film Festival and “Versión Original” magazine, initiatives of the Rebross Foundation.

“This is not a movie. Contemporary art and cinema in the Helga de Alvear Collection” can be visited at the Helga de Alvear Museum (Cáceres) between March 2 and June 4, 2023.